Jason W. Moore: End of the road
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The End of the Road? Agricultural
Revolutions in the Capitalist
World-Ecology, 1450–2010
JASON W. MOORE
Does the present socio-ecological impasse – captured in popular discussions of
the ‘end’ of cheap food and cheap oil – represent the latest in a long history of
limits and crises that have been transcended by capital, or have we arrived at
an epochal turning point in the relation of capital, capitalism and agricultural
revolution? For the better part of six centuries, the relation between world
capitalism and agriculture has been a remarkable one. Every great wave of
capitalist development has been paved with ‘cheap’ food. Beginning in the long
sixteenth century, capitalist agencies pioneered successive agricultural revolutions,
yielding a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus. This paper
engages the crisis of neoliberalism today, and asks: Is another agricultural
revolution, comparable to those we have known in the history of capitalism,
possible? Does the present conjuncture represent a developmental crisis of
capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new agro-ecological conditions for
another long wave of accumulation, or are we now witnessing an epochal crisis
of capitalism? These divergent possibilities are explored from a perspective that
views capitalism as ‘world-ecology’, joining together the accumulation of capital
and the production of nature in dialectical unity.
A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
I begin with two questions. First, if neoliberalism is in crisis, what kind of crisis is
it? Second, how does a production of nature perspective reshape our understanding
of neoliberalism, and of previous crises in historical capitalism?
‘Neoliberalism’ is a mighty signifier, and one mobilized to describe all manner
of socio-ecological movements in every region and at every scale since the early
1970s. The era as a whole is a messy bundle of contradictions that defies neat and
tidy definition. Not least, the neoclassical ideological project provides little guide to
actually existing capitalism as a whole, in the years following the initial crisis of the
‘golden age’ postwar world-economy and the Pax Americana (c. 1971–4). Highlights
of this neoliberal era would surely include the following. By 1979, the United States
had embarked upon a significant program of military Keynesianism, subsequently
accelerated and codified by Reagan’s election (Harvey 2005). The era’s greatest
economic ‘miracle’ – the rise of China – has been supervised by a dirigiste state of
the first order (Li 2008). The leading economic powers, grouped in the OECD,
saw government spending rise from about 25 per cent of GDP in 1965 to more
than 37 per cent three decades later (Cooper 2001, 195).And not least, global trade
liberalization, especially that centred on the World Trade Organization and its
Agreement on Agriculture, has seen no withdrawal of the state on a systemwide
basis. As Tony Weis has shown (2007), the leading states of the global North (the
USA above all) have not wavered for a moment in their support of domestic
agro-food sectors while pursuing the radical liberalization of peripheral economies.
It is for good reason that Gee characterizes the neoliberal era as one of ‘structural
mercantilism’ (2009).
My concern is with neoliberalism as a phase of world capitalist history, and
therefore a specific moment in the modern world-system’s patterns of evolution
and recurrence. I highlight two, dialectically bound, phenomena that constitute part
of the differentia specifica of the neoliberal era. First, I regard neoliberalism as a
distinctive phase of capitalism premised on taking first, and making second.This is the
‘Robin Hood in reverse’ character of neoliberalism – stealing from the poor and
giving to the rich – illuminated by Harvey (2005), Duménil and Lévy (2004) and
many others. Neoliberalism, like all previous phases of capitalism, has redistributed
wealth; unlike all previous phases of capitalism, it has not generated the conditions
for renewed economic growth and a broadly defined social development. As
Balakrishnan noted recently (2009), neoliberalism has failed to generate that ‘third
technological revolution’ upon which so much attention was lavished in the 1970s
(Mandel 1975). Technological development has certainly occurred – above all, in
control and information technologies – but at all turns it has ‘failed to release a
productivity revolution that would reduce costs and free up income for an all-round
expansion’ (Balakrishnan 2009, 14). Nowhere is this more evident than in agriculture,
where nearly three decades of experimentation with genetically modified
organisms has succeeded in transferring wealth and power from farmers to big
capital without any success in raising intrinsic yields (Gurian-Sherman 2009).1
The second distinctive feature of capitalism in the neoliberal era concerns the
penetration of finance into everyday life, and above all, into the reproduction of
extra-human nature.This is at the core of the ‘transition from the formal to the real
subsumption of nature to capital’ since the 1970s (Boyd et al. 2001). Financialization,
of course, is not new, and its cyclical resurgence has been with us since the
sixteenth century (Arrighi 1994). The term ‘financialization’ itself is subject to
multiple readings, so we can take care to emphasize financialization as a gravitational
field that influences and shapes the rules of reproduction for human and extrahuman
nature – working-class households come to depend on credit cards to pay
medical bills, and forest, field and mine become disciplined by a rate of profit
established not in industry, but in finance – that is, disciplined by a circuit of capital
that runs M-M+ not M-C-M+:
What this means in practice is that the real economy of goods and services
has been subordinated to the competitive logic of global financial markets.
Food companies, for example, are no longer simply competing in yoghurt,
or carbonated drinks or processed meats. They are competing on financial
markets to deliver the fastest and biggest possible rates of return to ‘impatient’
financial capital. (Rossman 2007, 5)
Taken together, these two movements specific to neoliberalism – although
certainly known in earlier phases of capitalism – generated a development model
premised on one part redistribution, one part ‘bubble economy’. The era since the
1997 Asian-centred financial crises may be regarded as a long series of bubbles.
Indeed, the stabilization of world markets at the time of writing (January 2010),
made possible by the injection of no less than $15 trillion into the world financial
system by the OECD governments in 2008–9 (Mason 2009), may properly be
regarded as a ‘bubble recovery’. I take as my guiding thread the hypothesis that
neoliberalism has reached the limits of developmental possibilities, the financial
crises and inflationary crescendo of 2008 marking the ‘signal’ crisis of the neoliberal
ordering of relations between humans and the rest of nature. Adapting Arrighi’s
useful language (1994), we can say that a signal crisis of an ecological regime occurs
when the initial conditions for a rapid expansion of the ecological surplus begin to
erode and food, energy and inputs become more, rather than less, expensive. A
terminal crisis marks the definitive shift from one mode of organizing global nature
to another, as in the transition from Dutch to British world hegemony and the
simultaneous transition from charcoal and peat to coal as the decisive energy source.
The central question today is whether the present conjuncture represents a
developmental crisis of capitalism that can be resolved by establishing new worldwide
conditions for accumulation, or whether we are now witnessing an epochal crisis of
capitalism.
Capitalism asWorld-Ecology:Towards a Theory of Crisis
I take up these questions from the perspective of capitalism as ‘world-ecology’, and
as a historical formation that has emerged and developed, through successive periods
of restructuring and renovation, since the long sixteenth century, c. 1450–1640
(Wallerstein 1974; Arrighi 1994; Moore 2000, 2003a–c, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010a,b).
While capitalism as a world-historical formation – premised on the progressive
removal of custom, state, institutional and other restraints on the endless accumulation
of capital and the endless commodification of human and extra-human nature
– is widely understood, capitalism as ‘world-ecology’ merits some explanation.
By ‘ecology’ and its cognates, I seek to transcend the Cartesian narrative of
capitalism and ‘the environment’. Rather, I focus on the relations of capitalism
through the uneasy fractures and interdependencies of social and biophysical natures.
I therefore borrow from the Greek root oikos (home or house), and speak in terms
of ecological regimes, revolutions and crises, recalling the philosopher-botanist
Theophrastus’s term oikeios ‘to indicate the relationship between a plant species and
the environment’ (Hughes 1994, 4).The oikeios is my term for that messy bundle of
relations that give rise to the nature–society dialectic.
If neoliberalism is typically regarded as a bundle of social forces that acts upon
the rest of nature, imposing its ‘footprint’ as the convenient metaphor has it,
capitalism as ‘world-ecology’ signifies the differentiated unity of the production of
nature and the endless accumulation of capital. Capitalism, in this perspective, does
not have an ecological regime. It is an ecological regime – signifying those relatively
durable patterns of class structure, technological innovation and the development of
productive forces, organizational forms and governance (formal and informal) that
have sustained and propelled successive phases of world accumulation since the long
sixteenth century. Ecological regime refers to the historically stabilized process
and conditions of extended accumulation; ecological revolutions mark the turbulent
emergence of these provisionally stabilized processes and conditions. I therefore
focus on the socio-ecological constitution of the strategic relations of historical
capitalism, rather than the ‘interaction’ of social and biophysical essences. This
constitutive dialectic manifests itself beyond the manifold ‘changes in the land’
commonly associated with environmental history: property relations, commoditycentred
resource extraction, cash-crop agriculture, energy complexes and so forth.
The production of nature–society relations has been every bit as much about
factories as forests, stock exchanges, shopping centres, slums and suburban sprawls as
soil exhaustion and species extinction.
Ecological regimes emerge through those market and institutional mechanisms
necessary to ensure adequate flows of energy, food, raw material and labour surpluses
to the organizing centres of world accumulation, but we should also attend
to the production complexes that consume these surpluses, and set in motion new
(and contradictory) demands upon the rest of nature. That is to say, the town–
country antagonism – overlapping, but not to be confused, with the core–periphery
divide – is the decisive geographical relation. Ecological regimes constitute a matrix
of relations governing ‘town’ (consuming surpluses) as well as ‘countryside’ (producing
surpluses). Foster’s ‘metabolic rift’ (2000), then, is not merely a particular
effect of capitalism but is constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. Every
phase of capitalism emerges through a revolution in nature–society relations – new
metabolic rifts, and much beyond – that creates new possibilities for the expanded
accumulation of capital (Moore 2000).
What constitutes these possibilities? All great waves of capital accumulation have
unfolded through a greatly expanded ecological surplus, manifested in cheap food,
cheap energy and cheap inputs.The creation of this ecological surplus is central to
accumulation over the longue durée.There is a dialectic between capital’s capacity to
appropriate biophysical and social natures at low cost, and its immanent tendency
to capitalize the reproduction of labour power and extra-human natures. I will turn
to this dialectic of the appropriation and capitalization of nature–society relations
presently. First, however, we can ground the tension between these two moments in
Marx’s theory of underproduction.
It is often forgotten that Marx offered a theory of underproduction alongside
one of overproduction.The achievement of the Industrial Revolution was to reverse
the greatest problem of early capitalism – the underproduction of basic inputs,
especially fuel, fibres and timber, for the centres of commodity production (Moore
2007, 2010a,b). The contradiction itself was not, however, abolished, but only
checked. Is it possible that capitalism is moving towards a resurgence of the
tendency towards underproduction? Let us hold this possibility as an open question.
Marx’s theory of underproduction crisis – he calls it a ‘general law’ of accumulation
– argues that ‘the rate of profit is inversely proportional to the value of the
raw materials’ (1967 III, 111).The very dynamism of capitalist production leads the
‘portion of constant capital that consists of fixed capital . . . [to] run significantly
ahead of the portion consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for
these raw materials grows more rapidly than their supply’ (ibid., 118–19). There is
an important tension between the ‘overproduction of machinery’, and the ‘underproduction’
of raw materials (Marx 1967 III, 119). The great accomplishment of
capitalism has, therefore, consisted in reducing the cost of inputs, while simultaneously
expanding by orders of magnitude the material volume of commodity
production – hence the centrality of the commodity frontier in modern world
history, enabling the rapid mobilization, at low cost (and maximal coercion), of
epoch-making ecological surpluses.
The tendency towards underproduction has therefore been checked over the past
two centuries through the combined and uneven dynamics of geographical expansion
and socio-technical innovation. It is something of an optical illusion that we
usually associate capitalism’s great ecological revolutions – commonly discussed in
terms of successive agricultural and industrial revolutions – with increasing capitalization
alone.The long history of ‘capital-intensive’, epoch-making innovations –
above all, the early modern shipbuilding–cartographic revolution, the nineteenth
century steam engine and the internal combustion engine of the twentieth century
– has indeed been marked by the geographically specific concentration of capital in
particular places, above all in the heartlands of the Dutch, British and American
hegemonic regimes. And yet every epoch-making innovation has also marked an
audacious revolution in the organization of global space, and not merely in the
technics of production. Thus, epoch-making innovations have joined together productivity
and plunder in a world-historical act that drives down the share of world nature directly
dependent on the circuit of capital. The ‘steam engine’, for instance, was unthinkable
without the vertical frontiers of coal mining and the horizontal frontiers of colonial
and white-settler expansion in the long nineteenth century. The result is a (temporary)
downward ratchet of the systemwide organic composition of capital –
thereby providing a crucial condition for the revival of profitability – even as capital
formation leaps forward in the metropolitan and hegemonic centres.
There are two key concepts here, the ecological surplus and the capitalization of
nature. First, an ecological surplus does not refer to large or small amounts of ‘stuff’,
but rather to a bundle of socio-ecological relations. There are four principal forms
of this surplus: labour power, food, energy and non-energy inputs such as metals,
wood and fibres. The relation between cheap food and the price of labour power
is especially close. The key point, which can scarcely be overemphasized, is that
‘cheap’ food, energy and inputs are cheap to the degree that they issue a downward
revision of the systemwide organic composition of capital – the fixed, and no less
important, circulating, moments of constant capital.
The relation to systemwide capitalization is crucial, for the ecological surplus is
only partially produced through the circuit of capital. The ecological surplus is,
rather, delivered through some combination of capitalized production (e.g. farm
mechanization) and the appropriation of nature as ‘free gift’. Energy-intensive
agriculture, for instance, develops by appropriating biophysical natures formed over
long geological time (water and oil pumped from aquifers and fields). In this way,
intensive capitalization and extensive appropriation form a dialectical unity.
If every phase of capitalism has emerged through a revolution in the ecological
surplus, where today can such surpluses be found and produced? This is the
indispensable question in ascertaining the relations between the (so-called) ‘economic’
and ‘environmental’ moments of the present crisis.We are living through the
greatest economic downturn since the 1930s, or so we are told (Eichengreen and
O’Rourke 2009). But how appropriate is the comparison with the Great Depression?
The present world conjuncture, and its relative stagnation, or worse, in the
delivery of food and energy surpluses, calls forth two other comparisons. The first
is the era commonly associated with the early Industrial Revolution, and the
progressive exhaustion of England’s agricultural revolution between 1763 and 1815,
linked up with an agricultural ‘deceleration’ – marked by stagnating labour productivity,
rising cereal prices and a new polarization of agrarian class structure – that
reached from the Valley of Mexico to Scandinavia (Slicher van Bath 1963; Abel
1980; Jackson 1985). This marked the signal crisis of one ecological regime, and it
threatened the rise of industrial capitalism (hence Ricardo’s fear that rising food
prices would throttle industrialization). England, the breadbasket of early eighteenth
century Europe, in the later eighteenth century saw food prices rise by 200 per
cent, four times faster than the industrial price index (O’Brien 1985, 776) – a key
moment of what I call a developmental ecological crisis. Land productivity could have
been increased, given the best practices of the period, but only through labourintensification,
and this would have contracted the reserve army of labour, at
precisely the moment when it was most needed for industry and empire. The
solution was ultimately found in two great frontiers, which yielded two great
sources of windfall profit. The first frontier was vertical, moving into the Earth to
extract coal.The second was horizontal, moving across the Earth to produce wheat,
especially in North America.When another ‘great depression’ arrived in the 1870s,
the era’s rapid industrialization was possible on the basis of cheap food, delivered by
the co-operative labours of both frontiers, at the same time as mass starvation in
South Asia and China and genocide in North America.
It is also possible that the most appropriate comparison for the crisis of neoliberalism
is the crisis of feudalism.This was an epochal crisis of nature–society relations
(Moore 2007).The origins of today’s ecological crisis can be found in the responses
of Europe’s ruling classes to the crises of the fourteenth century.There are striking
parallels between the world-system today and a broadly feudal Europe at the dawn
of the fourteenth century: the agricultural regime, once capable of remarkable
productivity gains, entered stagnation; a growing share of the population lived in
cities; expansive trading networks connected far-flung economic centres, and epidemiological
flows between them; climate change (the onset of the ‘Little Ice Age’)
had begun to strain an already overextended agro-demographic order; and resource
extraction, especially in silver and copper, faced new geo-technical challenges,
fettering profitability and limited output. After six centuries of sustained expansion,
by the fourteenth century feudal Europe had reached the limits of its development
– for reasons of its environment, its configuration of social power and, above all, the
relations between the two.
In short, my working proposition is that we can best discern the nature of the
present global crisis – including speculations on eco-catastrophe that have gained traction on
the left (Foster 2009) – by clarifying how we understand nature–society relations in
the history of capitalism. Is today’s crisis developmental, and therefore open to
resolution through new forms of productivity and plunder, as occurred after 1830 in
the British-led world-system? Or is it an epochal crisis that cannot be resolved within
the logic of endless accumulation, and whose outcome is by definition unknowable?
What better point of departure to engage these questions than the history of agriculture
in the neoliberal era, evaluated through the cyclical movements and secular
trends of the capitalist world-ecology from the long sixteenth century?
Capitalism and the Centrality of Cheap Food
For the greater part of six centuries, the relation between capitalism and agriculture
has been a remarkable one. In contrast with all previous civilizations, capitalism
organized a series of extraordinary expansions of the food surplus, through successive
agricultural revolutions.The ‘golden ages’ of pre-capitalist civilizations invariably
turned to crisis so long as cultivation remained in the hands of peasants, who were
not subject to market discipline. Sooner or later demographic expansion undercut
land and labour productivity, and along with it, the agricultural surplus available for
commercial and manufacturing growth in the broader social economy. Such had
been the case with feudalism (Moore 2003b).
In contrast, capitalism achieved its long-run economic expansion by means of
imposing bourgeois property relations on the countryside, compelling the transition
from peasant producer to capitalist farmer.With the transition to capitalism,
the imposition of private property in land, backed by the power of the modern
state (and its imperial formations), propelled a process of dispossession and differentiation
that enabled rising labour productivity in agriculture and a rising food
surplus.Vast reservoirs of labour power took shape to feed the satanic mills, and vast
agricultural surpluses were mobilized to feed these workers. From the Dutch and
English agricultural revolutions of the early modern era, to the family farm and
Green Revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the bloody expropriations
of capital have justified themselves on the basis of this signal achievement
(‘modernization’).
The road to the modern world, it seems, has been paved with cheap food.As noted
earlier, food, energy and inputs are ‘cheap’ to the degree that they are produced, and
otherwise mobilized, at significantly lower costs than the systemwide average, and at
significantly high volumes to drive down the costs of production for the system as
a whole. The price of food is so pivotal because it conditions the price of labour.
The great eras of capitalist development have always been conditioned on massive
demographic expansion and massive proletarianization. The signal contribution of
agricultural revolutions to the course of capitalist development can be found here, in
driving down the relative cost of food while driving forward proletarianization.
Every great wave of world accumulation, and every great (‘hegemonic’) power,
has developed on the basis of far-flung reconstitutions of world-ecology, with
agricultural revolutions at their centre. Does the present impasse – captured in
popular discussions of the ‘end’ of cheap food and cheap oil (e.g. Roberts 2004,
2008) – represent the latest in a long history of limits and crises that have been
transcended by capital? Is another agricultural revolution, comparable to those we
have known in the history of capitalism, possible?
Or have we arrived at an epochal turning point in the relation of capital,
capitalism and agricultural revolution?
We may consider the conditions for such an agricultural revolution from the
standpoint of the four major ways in which the Left has engaged the Agrarian
Question in the long twentieth century: the contributions of agriculture to capitalist
development as a whole; the contradictions between capitalist agriculture and
biophysical natures; the penetration of agriculture by capital, such that agroecological
production has become increasingly dependent on the circuit of capital;
and the role of peasantries and agrarian classes of labour in the struggle for
democracy and socialism (Kautsky 1988; Byres 1996; Moore 2008, 2009; Bernstein
2010). In this essay, I concentrate on the first three moments, to argue for a way of
seeing historical capitalism as an ecological regime. Situating recent world agricultural
history in the neoliberal era (from the early 1970s) within the long-run and
large-scale patterns of recurrence and evolution in the modern world-system, my
intention is to present a series of guiding threads to open new discussions on the
future of capitalism as a global socio-ecological formation – capitalism as not merely
‘world-economy’ but as world-ecology, joining together the accumulation of capital
and the production of nature in dialectical unity.
NEOLIBERALISM AS ECOLOGICAL PROJECT:TOWARDS AN
‘AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION IN REVERSE’?
In the wake of skyrocketing food prices and worldwide food riots in 2008
(Holt-Giménez and Patel 2009), the question of agriculture occupies a central place
in our thinking about the present crisis, and the future of capitalism. Even as food
commodity prices on the world market declined (though still higher than 2004
levels), real food prices through the periphery remained high, or ‘continue[d] to
increase’ into spring 2009 (Blas 2009b). The predictable consequence was rising
official world hunger, topping the one billion mark for the first time, with at least
twice that number suffering from ‘micro-nutrient deficiencies’ (Weis 2007, 12; Blas
2009a). It is an ominous parallel to the resurgence of chronic famine and food
insecurity that characterized feudal Europe after the first signs of systemic crisis at
the dawn of the fourteenth century; in less than a century, feudalism was done for
as a world-historical project (Moore 2003b).
Agricultural revolutions in the capitalist world-ecology have accomplished two
big things. First, they have yielded a quantum leap in the food surplus – it is a
‘surplus’, because the expanded body of use-values is sufficiently large to drive
down the systemwide costs of reproducing labour power. This food surplus is one
moment of a broader ecological revolution that accompanies transitions from one
phase of capitalism to another – revolutions that yield what I call the relative
ecological surplus, whose signal contribution is the significant reduction of the
value-composition of key primary commodities such as food and raw materials.
Second, agricultural revolutions have been central to the successive rise of the
Dutch, British and American hegemonies in capitalism. Hegemonies are ecological
projects, and each great power wove together internal and external agricultural
revolutions in the drive to world primacy.
It is difficult to see these two accomplishments in the history of neoliberalism.
Historically, ascendant hegemonic powers have led an agricultural revolution that
yielded a quantum leap in the delivery of cheap food to a critical mass of the world
proletariat – the Dutch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Americans in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries (Friedmann 1978; Overton 1996; Brenner 2001;Walker 2004).
These revolutions were, in Arrighi’s sense of the term, ‘organizational revolutions’
(1994), unfolding at multiple scales and extending from innovations in the forces of
production to new forms of credit and transport. The connection with the world
proletariat is crucial.The chief determinant of the minimum wage threshold for any
working-class household is the price of food and, therefore, the price of food is, on
a systemwide basis, the chief determinant of value, qua abstract social labour. Food
is, to recall the arguments of the previous section, ‘cheap’ to the extent that it
reduces the ‘value’ of commodified labour power, and augments capital’s capacity to
extract surplus value.
Is the neoliberal world order – in the midst of a signal but not yet terminal crisis
– leading capitalism towards what Braudel once called an ‘agricultural revolution in
reverse’ (1972, 427), that is, towards a relative decline in labour productivity and the
relative food surplus? Until the late twentieth century, every epoch-making ‘economic
miracle’, as we have observed, rested upon an epoch-making agricultural
revolution sufficient not merely to feed itself, but also to lead the world. Every
world hegemony provided a new model of agricultural development: the Dutch
Republic was the ‘mecca’ of agricultural knowledge for Europe in the seventeenth
century (Moore 2010b). Later, the English and then the Americans would dispense
worldwide, by means fair and foul, their agronomic wisdom to the rest of the world
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Kloppenburg 1988; Drayton 2001).
The world agriculture constituted by neoliberalism was highly successful in
delivering cheap food, as Figure 1 suggests. In 2001, food had never been so cheap
– even as US consumers faced rising prices for healthy food and falling prices for
junk food (Patel 2007). By December 2007, food prices were at their highest in real
terms since 1846, the year The Economist began keeping track (Buntrock 2007). It
was a spectacular reversal of fortune.
What had happened? Beginning in the 1970s, and picking up steam with the
debt crises of the early 1980s, the ‘political determination of world agricultural
commodity prices [that] emerged through the Uruguay Round negotiations’ and
into the WTO-era radically decoupled world market prices from production costs
(McMichael 2005, 282). This was crucial to two major developments. First, and
most importantly, world food prices dropped by 39 per cent between 1975 and
1989, and still further in the decade that followed (ibid., 278; see also FAO 2009).
Cheap food has always been indispensable to the revival of world accumulation,
even in eras of financialization (Moore 2008, 2010b). Second, the radical decoupling
of world price and production costs created major new opportunities for the
concentration and centralization of capital in the agro-food sector, such that by
2000 just four corporations controlled ‘82 per cent of beefpacking [in the USA], 75
per cent of hogs and sheep, and half of chickens’ (Greider 2000). By 2008, ‘five
corporations control[led] 90 per cent of the international grain trade, three countries
produce[d] 70 per cent of exported maize, and the thirty largest food retailers
control[led] one-third of world grocery sales’ (McMichael 2009).
The unravelling of the cheap food regime (along with those governing cheap oil
and metals) began in 2003 and reached an inflationary crescendo in 2008, signalling
a decisive moment of neoliberalism’s crisis. For this reason, following Arrighi, I
would characterize the present conjuncture (c. 2008–15) as the signal crisis of
neoliberalism as ecological regime. It is certainly true that neoliberalism lives on as
a ‘class project’ (Harvey 2009), and as a mode of ‘market-disciplinary regulatory
restructuring’ (Brenner et al. 2010). But these expressions of ‘neoliberalization’ are,
in the final analysis, dependent upon the system’s capacity to deliver cheap food, oil
and inputs. Hence, signal crisis refers to the moment at which the ecological regime
has reached its tipping point in the production of the relative ecological surplus, the
mass of use-values (appropriation) relative to the demands of world value production
(capitalization). A terminal crisis still awaits.
The crucial point is that each agricultural revolution moves beyond a series of
modest technical adjustments that yield incremental gains to realize a great leap
forward in the provision of cheap food, thereby enabling a revolutionary expansion
(and subsequent, low-cost reproduction) of the world proletariat that accompanies a
new long wave. Each agricultural revolution, therefore, has realized a great leap
forward in the provision of cheap food. It is difficult to overstate the success, in
capitalist terms, of the post-SecondWorldWar agricultural revolution, which opened
in the mid-1950s with US Public Law 480 (1954) and Khrushchev’s push to expand
Soviet cereal output (1953).The subsequent globalization in the 1960s of the ‘Green
Revolution’ model – which I take as a convenient shorthand for the capital-intensive
‘industrial agriculture’ that developed first in the USA during the early twentieth
century – was not only a pivot of American hegemonic leadership but also achieved
a yield revolution unprecedented in human history. Between 1950 and 1990, global
cereal output nearly tripled, propelled by a rise in ‘grain yield per hectare . . . by
roughly 2.4 times’ (Weis 2007, 17). Meanwhile, world cereal trade more than tripled
during 1952–72, and the real price of rice, maize and wheat dropped by 60 per cent
between 1960 and the end of the last century (FAO 2002, 11;Warman 2003, 203).
World market prices for staple foods fell steadily as world urbanization – a roughand-
ready index of proletarianization – proceeded at breakneck speed (Davis 2006).
Even after the crises of the early 1970s, the vitality of the ‘national farm sectors’
created through the Green Revolution would provide strong yield growth for
another decade and, after 1982, offered fertile terrain for conversion into neoliberal
agro-export zones (McMichael 1997, 1998; Tilman et al. 2002). This postwar agricultural
revolution ably meets our litmus test: a revolutionary expansion of the food
surplus during a revolutionary expansion of the world proletariat.
For the agricultural revolutions of historical capitalism, modest gains in productivity
are not enough.Today, food is not getting cheaper, even if we attribute some
measure of the 2003–8 commodity boom to financial speculation (Ghosh 2010). It
makes little difference, for world accumulation as a whole, if food, energy and raw
materials are underproduced because of biophysical exhaustion, social unrest or
speculation. As finance capital increasingly unifies world accumulation with the
structures of everyday life (food, water, housing) – rendering these latter dependent
upon the vitality of M-M+ through credit mechanisms – this suggests the need to
view financialization and the commodification of nature as differentiated moments
within the unity of late capitalism.
Globalizing malnutrition does not add up to a ‘food crisis’ (pace Magdoff and
Tokar 2009.) So long as hunger can be corralled, and imposed on the very poorest
of the world, there is no great problem. The great boom of the long twentieth
century was constructed on the mass graves of the ‘late Victorian holocausts’
supervised by the British Empire, during the late nineteenth century era of financialization
(Arrighi 1994; Davis 2001). What matters is the price of food in the
heartlands of proletarianization, where there was no food crisis in the late nineteenth
century. Indeed, world cereal prices declined sharply, propelled by genocide,
‘railroadization’ and the first serious mechanization of agriculture (Friedmann 1978;
Kautsky 1988; O’Rourke 1997).
Where will capital today find the conditions for another such era of cheap food?
Neoliberalism pins its hopes for agricultural revolution on biotechnology, associated
with all manner of the ‘new enclosures’ (Shiva 1997; Rifkin 1998; Weis 2007;
Cooper 2008). It fits the classic model of agricultural revolution, in so far as it
effects a redistribution of income (further differentiating classes of farmers), is
enabled by the property-making and -securing capacities of states and state-like
institutions, and constitutes a promising opportunity for accumulation by some
sectors of capital. It does not fit the model, in so far as it has yet to deliver a yield
boom sufficiently large to create (in concert with cheap energy and cheap inputs),
the conditions for a new systemic cycle of accumulation.
The globalization of agricultural biotechnology has failed to slow the progressive
decline in yield growth worldwide, now for the better part of a quarter-century
(Tilman et al. 2002). If agricultural revolutions in the modern world have justified
their bloody expropriations on the basis of socio-technical innovations that maximized
labour productivity in agriculture, and drove down the cost of basic
foodgrains, the so-called biotech revolution has made little progress. A decade of
research has yielded the conclusion that agricultural biotech has done little to
improve intrinsic yields (Benbrook 2001; Gurian-Sherman 2009) – even prompting
Monsanto to announce plaintively that ‘the main uses of GM crops are to make
them insecticide- and herbicide-tolerant. They don’t inherently increase the yield.They
protect the yield’ (quoted in Ritch 2009, emphasis added).As it turns out, Roundup
Ready® crops, soy above all, are not doing much to protect yield either, as ‘superweeds’
have evolved to survive the onslaught of the famed herbicide (Benbrook
2009).
This ‘superweed effect’ marks one aspect of agriculture’s differentia specifica in Marx’s
important – if too often neglected – argument, noted earlier, that the ‘overproduction’
of machinery (fixed capital) tends towards the ‘underproduction’ of raw
materials (circulating capital). Rising costs of energy and inputs used in a given
production cycle reinforce the tendency towards a declining rate of profit inscribed
in rising mechanization. As capital invested in machinery overtakes that spent on
wages, therefore, the very productivity gains achieved by mechanization and standardization
set in motion widening demands for circulating capital (inputs). But the
production of energy, wood, metals, fibres and other inputs is rooted in socioecological
processes that do not respond quickly or easily to market signals. The
world oil sector, for example, has been characterized by underinvestment, relative to
rising demand for cheap energy, since the mid-1980s (IEA 2008). And in agriculture,
rising fertilizer prices in 2003–8 tended to undermine farm-level profitability.
But there is more to this story. In agriculture, relative to factory production,
another element is introduced. Efforts to increase labour productivity have led, in
the neoliberal era, to new strategies that seek to discipline biophysical nature at a
cellular and even genetic level. This is the ‘transition from the formal to the real
subsumption of nature to capital’ (Boyd et al. 2001).The problem for capital is that
biophysical natures evolve faster than the capacity of capital to control them. The
development of new GMO varieties is not delivering a new yield revolution
(Gurian-Sherman 2009); moreover, there is a growing tendency for farmers to turn
away from these varieties in some important regions, such as Brazil’s Mato Grosso
(Reuters 2009).
Capitalism today confronts the exact opposite of its early modern bounty.The rise
of capitalism was greatly facilitated by a series of ‘yield honeymoons’ through which
the introduction of OldWorld crops into the NewWorld (sugar), and NewWorld
crops into the Old World (potatoes), provided massive yield windfalls (Dark and
Gent 2001; Moore 2007). The advantage of a yield honeymoon is that very little
capital need be set in motion to produce very large amounts of food.What capital
wants, above all, is to invest a little and to gain a lot: a firm wants minimal
capitalization to secure its maximal competitive position. Historically, the secret of
capitalism’s success has been to maintain strict limits on the extent of capitalized
nature. Capital’s first preference is to appropriate nature, rather than to produce it
through the circuit of capital. But the opportunities for appropriation, sufficient
to resolve neoliberalism’s crisis, are not expanding, but in fact contracting – and in
agriculture this contraction owes something to the superweed effect. When Neil
Smith sees the production of nature entering a new phase, characterized by ‘capitalization
all the way down’ to the genetic relations of life itself (2006, 21), he suggests
that this may provide the conditions for a new phase of accumulation. I am not at all
certain that this follows.While pockets of highly capitalized primary production have
always thrived in the modern world-system, a decline of the ecological surplus has
always issued from the rising capitalization of world nature.The point of departure for
every great wave of accumulation has been the radical enlargement of the geographical
arena for commodity production and exchange, thereby extending the realm of
socialized nature appropriated (but not yet subsumed) by capital.
The relative scarcity of external frontiers underpins a central feature of our times.
Not only ‘cheap oil’ but also ‘cheap food’ may now be finished, a view not limited
to critics of the agro-food system.The OECD forecasts real price increases of 10–35
per cent over the next decade for a basket of key food commodities, in a projection
grounded in the dubious expectation that yield growth will follow the ‘historical
trend’ of 1960–2000 (OECD 2008; OECD/FAO 2008, 47).The UN Environmental
Program’s recent report on the ‘environmental food crisis’ (Nellemann et al.
2009) predicts, inter alia, climate change-driven reduction in cropland by 8–20 per
cent by mid-century; mounting pressures on aquifers and above all glaciers, signalling
looming water scarcity; the proliferation of invasive species, and rising biological
resistance to pesticides and herbicides; rising fertilizer prices, and their declining
effect on yields; escalating competition for arable land from agrofuels (already
one-third of the US maize crop in 2008); and, perhaps most ominously, ‘an absolute
decline in the productive land area (Net Primary Productivity) across 12 percent’ of
the planet, with the areas most affected home to nearly one-fifth of world population
– all of which will be amplified still further by climate change and the
mounting ‘risk of abrupt and major irreversible changes’ (ibid., 40, 43).The progress
of global warming is, moreover, already implicated in the yield suppression of major
cereal crops (Cline 2007).
This is bad news for a world-economy undergoing the most serious depression
since the late nineteenth century, when cereal prices declined by nearly 27 per cent
between 1870 and 1914 (O’Rourke 1997, 789), underwriting a rapid shift in the
global centre of gravity from Britain as workshop of the world to the USA as
the world’s assembly line.What is the analogous process for today’s workshop of the
world? From where will China’s several hundred million industrial and urban
workers be fed?
I am not at all sure that the old answers to this question apply, if the history of
capitalism is any guide. The sixteenth century Dutch grew rich thanks to cheap
grain from Poland’s Vistula; the nineteenth century English had Ireland, the Caribbean
and the American Midwest.When the USA came to world power, it had the
Midwest, plus the American South and California, and Latin America. Decisive food
surpluses were won in all cases from untapped frontier zones, coupled (increasingly)
with the productivity-maximizing genius of capitalism. Even South Asia’s Green
Revolution owed much to the appropriation of ‘vertical’ frontiers: plentiful aquifers
at home and relatively cheap energy supplies (for fertilizer) abroad. Cheap water and
cheap energy qua fertilizer are rapidly disappearing today (Shah et al. 2003; Schill
2008). And while biotechnology and biopiracy through the ‘new’ enclosures have
succeeded in greasing the wheels of world accumulation since the 1990s, they have
done little to achieve what all previous agricultural revolutions had done: create the
conditions for a long-term relative decline in food prices. If the crisis of neoliberalism
today is in fact a developmental crisis, one open to resolution within the
capitalist mode of production, we would expect to see an agricultural revolution
taking shape in the most dynamic new centre of accumulation, China. But following
the burst of productivity and aggregate output in the 1980s, there is little to
suggest that China is on the brink of an agricultural revolution that will not only
feed the world, but lead capitalism to a new golden age (Smil 2004).
The transition from ‘old’ to ‘new’ agrarian questions during the 1970s, suggested
for very different reasons by Bernstein (2001) and McMichael (1997), points to the
exhaustion of capitalism’s agro-ecological frontiers, set in motion during the long
sixteenth century. While there are still forests and tracts of ‘underutilized’ land to
enclose and exploit, today’s frontiers are but drops in the bucket relative to the
demands of value accumulation. Frontiers are not merely places ‘out there’ (and out
of time) but are constituted by the varying logics of systemic reproduction in its
successive developmental phases. This closure of the ‘Great Frontier’ (Webb 1964)
marks an epochal transition in the history of capitalism. The closure of resource,
labour and waste frontiers has cut off a key avenue of capital’s escape from the rising
costs of production.
The rising capitalization of world agriculture – through which the farm becomes
the agro-ecological pivot of ‘downstream’ and ‘upstream’ commodification – not
only amplifies the tendency towards a declining rate of profit, but in equal measure
amplifies the pressures to escape it, through efforts to extend the frontier of ‘technical
control’ (Edwards 1979). The rise of American capitalism in the late nineteenth
century implied, and indeed necessitated, a world-historical shift from the primitive
accumulation of botanical knowledge to the expanded reproduction of botanical
knowledge, pioneered by US land-grant agricultural colleges, and globalized after
the SecondWorldWar through the CGIAR network of International Area Research
Centres (Kloppenburg 1988). There is, then, a longer history to the efforts of
Monsanto, inter alios, to centralize agricultural knowledge in the hands of capital and
displace farmers’ long accumulated and tested ‘craft’ knowledge of local conditions
and practices based on it (Glenna 2003; Stone 2007). In this light, the Green
Revolution, with its recipes for growing (this much seed, this much fertilizer, this
much water and so forth), may be re-read as the agro-ecological moment of the
control revolution that enabled the rise of giant industry, and the wholesale displacement
of skilled with semi-skilled labour, characteristic of the American mass
production regime (Davis 1985) – itself an ecological project of the highest order. In
so doing, leading agencies of agrarian capital (agribusiness) move at cross-purposes to
capital as a whole, undermining the very flexibility achieved through the nineteenth
century’s family farm revolution in North America, which relaxed the operation
of the law of value through the deployment of family rather than wage labour
(Friedmann 1978).The erosion of this flexibility certainly offers a short-run advantage
to capital, but undermines a socio-ecological pillar upon which the remarkable
expansion of the long twentieth century and its agricultural revolution rested.
Capitalization is not alchemy.The socio-technical innovations propelling modernity’s
successive agro-ecological revolutions were never able to create something
out of nothing.The world-ecological storehouse of such stimuli is not inexhaustible
– new energy sources, scientific regimes, technical packages and organizational
forms cannot be simply conjured out of the productivity-maximizing magic of
bourgeois ingenuity. These stimuli must come from somewhere.And so it is not only the
specific stimuli that are exhausted – as in the chemical–technical repertoire of
the Green Revolution – but also the underlying vitality of the specifically capitalist
oikeios. These stimuli have pivoted on the relation between the variable forms of
bourgeois territorial and property relations, technical dynamism and the availability
of un- or undercapitalized nature. The English agricultural revolution of the long
seventeenth century – our classic frame of reference – was not ‘simply’ the expression
of convertible husbandry, new drainage systems and so forth, but could only
proceed on the basis of a double movement of geographical expansion: an ‘inner’
conversion of nitrogen-rich pasture into arable land (therefore opening an expansive
nitrogen frontier) within England (Overton 1996); and an ‘outer’ conversion of the
English Caribbean into plantation monocultures, in sugar above all (Dunn 1972).
English, then British, capitalism thrived on the basis of this double movement.The
Industrial Revolution took shape on its basis, the first movement issuing labour
surpluses (Brenner 1976), the second, capital surpluses (Blackburn 1997).
Sometime after 1760, this ‘first’ agricultural revolution was showing clear signs of
exhaustion.Within England, per-acre yield growth stagnated after mid-century, and
most of European agriculture experienced the same effect (Slicher van Bath 1963;
Abel 1980; Clark 1991). Although Pomeranz does not see this is a capitalist crisis,
he quite fruitfully posits this impasse in historical–relational rather than abstract–
materialist terms – that is, from the standpoint of socio-ecological organization
rather than biophysical properties narrowly defined:
[P]er-acre and total yields from arable land remained flat and the threat of
decline constant, until Britain began mining, importing, and later synthesizing
fertilizer mostly after 1850. . . . [A]lthough the English studied continental
practices, classical agricultural manuals, and their own experiments very
intently, much of what they learned about how best to maintain soil fertility
while increasing yields was not actually applied in England, because it involved
highly labour-intensive methods and English capitalist farmers . . .were intent
on labour-cost minimization and profit maximization. The methods they
adopted instead, which raised labour productivity, represented a fundamental
break with much of the literature on best farming practices and actually interfered with
preserving soil fertility in many cases. (2000, 216–17, emphasis added)
The problem was not that ‘natural limits’ had been reached, but rather that what
appeared as a biophysical impasse was itself a limit of capitalist relations. Pomeranz’s
explanation focuses on the calculations of capitalist farmers, but may be reinterpreted
from the standpoint of capital as a whole. Until off-farm phosphates became
available after the NapoleonicWars (Thompson 1968), the only way to significantly
raise land yields was through labour-intensification. But this was precisely the
moment when such labour supplies were most needed, to propel both the industrialization
drive and to meet the manpower demands of the war.
Is it possible that the neoliberal ecological regime has entered a phase of its
development broadly analogous to the crisis of early capitalism’s ecological regime in
the eighteenth century? Or does the crisis run even deeper? As a phase of capitalism,
neoliberalism owed its very existence to the yield windfalls of the Green Revolution
– surficially ‘technical’ windfalls themselves, premised on the disintegrating effects of
market discipline imposed through state power.These windfalls were famously set in
motion in India in the later 1960s, but with important forerunners in Mexico and the
USA decades earlier (Wright 1990; Perkins 1997). Like every agricultural revolution
before it, the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s increased the relative
ecological surplus, through the judicious (if brutal) reconfiguration of peasant
ecologies, especially in South and South-East Asia (Griffin 1974; Shiva 1991). In one
sense, this had long been the pattern, as agricultural revolutions had increased the
ecological surplus through the appropriation of nature’s free gifts, looking backwards
from California and the American Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century
(Kloppenburg 1988;Walker 2004) to Europe in the later nineteenth century (van
Zanden 1991), the American Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century (Cronon
1991), and the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions of the seventeenth and
sixteenth centuries (Overton 1996; Brenner 2001), alongside contemporary plantation
revolutions, in sugar especially (Moore 2007).
In another sense, however, the Green Revolution did not fit the pattern,
prefiguring the neoliberal agro-ecological impasse today. It enjoyed a much lower
biophysical ‘rent’ than its forerunners – most recently, the agro-industrial revolution
of the American Midwest in the nineteenth century – and this goes a long way to
explaining the high rate of investment and technical change in the later period.
Relative to the worldwide ‘ecological crisis’ of peasant societies in the later nineteenth
century (Wolf 1969), the ecological revolution set in motion during the late
1960s represented an epochal leap forward in the capitalization of agro-ecologies
worldwide.
In contrast to the neoliberal era, the late nineteenth century represented an
aggregate decline in the capitalization of world nature – the absolute extension of
commodity production and exchange has tended to obscure the extent to which
minimal capital investment met with maximal imperial power to realize the epochal
appropriation of biophysical surpluses without (yet) capitalizing their delivery.Vast
new socialized, though not yet capitalized, ecological formations were drawn into
the matrix of accumulation. By compelling peasant producers throughout the new
peripheries to sell ‘without regard to price of production’ – as Engels observed in
the midst of the process (in Marx 1967, III, 726) – such appropriation relative to
capitalization contributed significantly to the rising ecological surplus of the late
nineteenth century.
The relation was reworked but not fundamentally remade in the long era of
the Green Revolution. It was an era that emerged first in the global North.
The commercial introduction of hybrid maize in the USA in the mid-1930s
promised not only rising yields per acre, and rising capitalization through mechanization
and skyrocketing fertilizer (and then pesticide) use. Hybrid maize marked
an early, pivotal moment in capital-oriented biological innovation. By crossing
inbred lines of maize whose seed produced high yields but could not be reproduced,
American seed companies severed the age-old connection between seed and
grain (Kloppenburg 1988, 91–129). Hybridization thus married bio-technical
control to the coercive dispositions of market competition, chaining metropolitan
farmers to the ‘vicious cycle . . . [of a] technological treadmill’ and accelerated class
differentiation (Kloppenburg 1988, 119; Glenna 2003).
The same dispositions played out later in the global South. Far from simply a
technological marvel of new seeds and new chemicals, the appropriation of the best
ecological spaces (good soil, good water) was necessary for the realization of the
socio-technical visions of the Green Revolution. A big part of the reason why the
Green Revolution was so successful (that is, where and when it was successful on its
own terms) was that it imposed cutting-edge technology on regions where the
value of labour and land was very low, driving down food prices and therefore, all
things being equal, the cost of variable capital. (In other words, cheap food relieved
pressure on capital’s wage bill, attenuating the falling rate of profit.) At the level of
appearances, we are treated, then, to something of an optical illusion – a new stream
of capital inputs leads one to think the Green Revolution in terms of capitalintensity.
But in so far as this ‘revolutionary’ project appropriated, at little or no cost
to capital, quality land, access to water and labour power, the value-composition of
yields was in fact very low, and therefore highly profitable. The revolutionary
achievements were made through plunder as much as through productivity.
Amongst the secrets of capital accumulation over the longue durée has been the
progressive (and always contested) conquest and absorption of human and extrahuman
nature whose reproduction was either relatively, or entirely, free from the
law of value. The contradiction in historical capitalism has been simultaneously to
preserve and create – and in the same motion, to undermine and appropriate – the
reproduction of ecologies (as oikeios) relatively autonomously from the circuit of
capital. Left ecology has illuminated the ongoing transition from the formal to the
real subsumption of (extra-human) nature to capital (Boyd et al. 2001; Smith 2006),
but has yet to grasp fully how the rising capitalization of nature proceeds on the
basis of the relative exhaustion of the conditions of production. So, for example, soil
exhaustion is ‘fixed’ through rising capitalization in the form of fertilizers, while
fertilizers themselves work only for so long before provoking pest invasions, escalating
pesticide use, which creates new resistances, and so forth. The upshot is that
the rising capitalization of nature creates a world-historical situation of rising production costs
stemming from the degradation of the conditions of production. Rising socio-ecological
exhaustion and rising capitalization are two sides of the same coin.
At the heart of the argument here is that the Green Revolution constituted a
new phase in the capitalization of global nature.2 As such, we would expect to see
an epoch-making expansion of the relative ecological surplus, at the beginning of
any revival of world accumulation, in terms of both extra-human nature (for
example, grain or energy surpluses available for sale at low cost), and the mobilization
of human nature qua relative surplus population. Such revolutions yield a
double windfall: cheap, extra-human resources to maximize yields (and minimize
2 In sharp contrast to the ‘new imperialism’ of 1873–1914, when capital’s appropriation of global
nature (in the new colonies, in the white settler zones etc.) outran the capitalization of nature. This
was true even in North America, with its massive appropriation of land, water and millennia of
‘stored’ but easily exhausted soil fertility.
their value component), thereby driving down food prices relative to those of
industrial goods; and expanding the reserve army of labour through mechanization,
labour-intensification and the differentiation of peasantries. As we have seen, the
period 1980–2000 offered the lowest world market prices for food in world history,
accompanied by the extraordinary expansion of the global working class. Freeman
(2005) thinks that nearly 1.5 billion workers ‘from China, India, and the former
Soviet Union entered the global labour pool’ in these decades. Even allowing for
exaggeration in this figure, these accomplishments reduced the cost of labour power
to global capital, and therefore counteracted the tendency towards declining profitability.
In the middle run of 25–35 years (roughly the durée of neoliberalism), we
would expect to see two contradictions within agriculture come into play, gradually
eroding the mechanisms for delivering (or even sustaining) an ecological surplus
sufficient for expanded accumulation. On the one hand is the rising organic
composition of capital at a systemwide level. This tendency has progressed farthest
in the USA, where the rising energy throughput of agriculture coincided with an
avalanche of farm bankruptcies, registering faltering profitability at the ‘enterprise’
level after the 1970s. By 2004, just 3.4 per cent of US farms produced over 45 per
cent of output by value, close to doubling the output share of the largest farms in
the 1970s (MacLellan and Walker 1980; Hendrickson et al. 2008, 311). This tendency
of farm concentration underpins the high rates of profitability enjoyed by
agribusiness in the neoliberal era (McMichael 2009).
On the other hand, the very escalation of rising energy throughput – declining
energy ‘efficiency’, if this is the right word for it (Pimentel et al. 1973, 2008) – can
be understood as, first, a farm-level response to the coercion of finance capital,
which demands rising productivity in relation to an average rate of profit determined
in great part by non-agricultural enterprises, and increasingly the financial
sector (M-M+); and, second, the relative exhaustion of neoliberal capacity to govern
biophysical natures. The latter has assumed two principal forms to date: escalating
resource depletion in water and soil especially, partially masked by nitrogen fertilizers;
and the creative response of extra-human nature to the disciplines of capitalism,
of which the ‘superweed effect’ is emblematic. Indeed, given the strongly bound
coevolution of superweeds with GMO soy, we may soon come to understand the
rise of the superweed as a world-historical event.
The post-1971 financial expansion – which represents a multiplication of systemwide
claims on the future ecological surplus – propelled a radical expansion of
property claims on the genetic diversity of the biosphere. This is not new, and in a
broad sense this too is a cyclical phenomenon of the world-economy.The ‘primitive
accumulation of botanical knowledge’ has been with us since the long sixteenth
century (Brockway 1979; Kloppenburg 1988; Cañizares-Esguerra 2004). What is
new, however, is neither enclosure, nor its latest incarnation qua ‘biopiracy’, but the
whole spectrum of efforts to rework and control nature at a genetic level. Neoliberalism
has joined rapid financialization with transitions from the ‘formal’ to the ‘real
subsumption of nature to capital’.And so we have moved from Captain Hook to Dr
Frankenstein in modernity’s production of nature.
Whether or not a biotech revolution will provide a way forward remains
uncertain (see Kloppenburg 2010;Wield et al. 2010 – this issue). Gurian-Sherman
(2009, 2), in the first comprehensive survey of biotechnology’s aggregate yield
effect, finds almost all gains in operational yields and not intrinsic yields (which
‘may also be thought of as potential yield’). Even if water and land constraints could
be overcome through new genetic–chemical combinations – and the ‘water question’
may well be more serious than commonly recognized (Gleick 2008) – the very
capital- and energy-intensive basis of late capitalist agriculture creates an even more
serious constraint on its capacity to raise yields significantly. The technical control
regime – in this instance, the control of weeds and pests – promises to induce the
evolution of more resistant pests and pathogens (Ruttan 2002).
There is, then, a ‘feedback’ contradiction at play here. On the one hand, capital
must realize an epoch-making expansion of the relative ecological surplus, manifested
as a massive expansion of ‘cheap’ food, energy and materials. On the other hand, the
very (capital-intensifying) strategies to enable such an expansion will enclose those
small zones of undercapitalized nature that still exist, and will intensify the effort to
fragment (and discipline the fragments of) global nature. Braverman’s illumination of
capital’s drive to reduce concrete labours into ‘universal and endlessly repeated
motions’ might well be extended to the objects of human labour as well (1974, 125).
The drive to reduce extra-human nature to an ‘interchangeable part’ (ibid.) – that is,
fragments – is, equally, an immanent feature of capitalist development: ranging from
the ‘forest-equivalents’ of seventeenth century European forest laws (Moore 2010a,b)
to the imposition of ‘extraordinary regular cadastral grids’ on the landscapes of North
America, Australia and elsewhere (Brayshay and Cleary 2002, 6) to the manipulation
of genetic material and the genomic mapping that it implies (Rifkin 1998).
Given the contraction of opportunities for appropriation, frontier expansion –
the first movement – implies an escalation of class and imperial projects to ‘reserve
the exclusivity of access to these resources’ (Amin 2008), and hence of costly social
and geopolitical tensions. The second movement of capitalization qua sociotechnical
innovation is already generating a bundle of unpredictable responses,
the superweed effect. The very strategies that seek to control any specific naturefragment
undermine the middle-run conditions through which productivity gains
and predictability can be realized.
For this reason, I am not much concerned with the ecological ‘overshoot’
preoccupations of much green, and even red–green, thinking these days (Catton
1982; Foster 2009), not because overshoot is a poor description, but because it is not
much of an explanation. The crucial issue, from the standpoint of the longue durée,
is that the ‘time–space compression’ central to the accumulation of capital both
depends upon, and drives ever faster, the time–space compression of biophysical
natures.There is a dialectic here: in historical capitalism, extra-human nature evolves
much faster than the social relations that seek to govern it. It is the very dynamism
of the system creates the mirage of suspending the dialectic. And yet for all the
hopes pinned on this mirage the biophysical moment is increasingly unpredictable
and defies efforts to discern impending qualitative shifts with any degree of certitude
(Scheffer et al. 2001).
As capital comes to circulate through (and not merely around) biophysical circuits,
the faster these ecological revolutions move from liberating to imprisoning accumulation.
Here is the political ecology of Nature as ‘opportunity’ and ‘obstacle’ – an
enabler of, and hindrance to, capital accumulation – in successive ecological regimes
(Mann 1990; Boyd et al. 2001).Thus each new ecological regime takes less time than
its predecessor to close the circle. This reflects two contradictions. First, there is the
acceleration of turnover time as capital penetrates primary production. This is the
transition from the 73-day chicken in 1955 to the 42-day chicken in 2005 (Boyd
2002, 637;Weis 2007, 61).We find the second in the ‘taming cycle’(Wallis 2000), with
the tale of the soybean and the superweed. The two moments find unification in
Patel’s quip that chickens are now‘soy with feathers’ (2007, 212). Every leap forward
in labour productivity (more chickens per working hour) also represents a leap
forward in toxification (more poisons per dollar) and the creative responses of
extra-human nature to the disciplines of capital (more weeds per hectare).
This inner logic of capital – its tendency to dissolve socio-ecological particularities
and reconstitute them as ‘interchangeable parts’ (e.g. cadastral grids, standardizing
hogs, green beans, and hamburgers, patenting genes) – tends to enable the
accumulation of capital for a time, but, in the absence of uncapitalized nature, is
unsustainable within the logic of capital accumulation itself. The temporal moment is
crucial, for the rising capitalization of nature works within established boundaries by
accelerating the appropriation of Marx’s ‘original sources’ of wealth, labour and land
(1976, 636–8). This acceleration poses one set of contradictions through the overproduction
of machinery and the underproduction of inputs.Another, perhaps more
destabilizing, set of contradictions emerges through the control efforts that seek to
render more predictable the relation with the rest of nature but, over the middle
run, create conditions of spiralling unpredictability.
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
For the better part of two centuries, capitalism ‘as world-ecology’ has produced
abundance, not scarcity. For this reason it is easy to forget – even on the Left (e.g.
Buck 2006) – that the history of capitalism has always been shaped by an explosive
dialectic of overproduction and underproduction. The technical dynamism of the
capitalist mode of production has obscured the former only through an extraordinary
and ‘long’ twentieth century of appropriating, enclosing and otherwise mobilizing
with minimal capital outlay, the ‘buffers’ of soil, water and air.These buffers are now
gone (McNeill 2000, 359).This dialectic of productivity and plunder works so long
as there are spaces that new technical regimes can plunder – cheap energy, fertile soil,
rich mineral veins. Agricultural revolutions have been a decisive part of the alwayscontingent
‘solutions’ to underproduction, enabled by the capitalist appropriation –
along with capitalized production – of cheap water, labour and energy. These
agricultural revolutions have been a pillar of capitalism’s global ecological fix strategy,
weaving together horizontal conquests (new continents absorbed) and vertical
enclosures (new mineral veins tapped or coalfields mined). So long as these fixes
expanded opportunities for appropriation faster than they demanded capitalization,
the ecological surplus expanded, and world accumulation revived. Capitalization
remains indispensable – indeed, it becomes more crucial over time – but only by
accelerating the exhaustion of the very conditions that sustain accumulation.
Capitalization can do its work only to the extent that a rising quantum of
biophysical nature can attach to the same level of capital investment. This is the
inner contradiction of the specifically capitalist ecological regime – the capitalization
of world nature tends to rise faster than the opportunities for appropriation,
reducing the ecological surplus. This manifests in rising costs of production
in agriculture, energy production and other primary sectors. And this can only be
counteracted by liberating new reservoirs of socialized natures – rivers, natural gas
fields, peasant societies – for the accumulation process. The relative ecological
surplus falls as the capitalization of global nature proceeds. This is one of the chief
ways in which capitalism not only ‘develops’, but ages. Today, there surely remain
ecological spaces relatively untouched by the violence of the commodity form. But
their relative weight in the world-system is incomparably lower today than it was in
1873, or even 1973.
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